Farewell, Camino: Development on Mac browser officially halted

Camino, the OS X browser that famously does things "the Mac way," has been discontinued after ten years of development. The announcement was made by project leader Stuart Morgan via the Camino blog:

After a decade-long run, Camino is no longer being developed, and we encourage all users to upgrade to a more modern browser. Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use.

Recent Mac converts—even not-so-recent converts like me—have it easy when it comes to picking a Web browser. OS X comes preloaded with Safari, a perfectly fine modern browser, and Chrome, Firefox, and even Opera are a couple clicks away. All of the browsers are reasonably quick, well-supported, and look and act like Mac applications are supposed to look at act, but things weren't always this way; ten years ago, the Mac browser landscape was pretty bleak.

When it first appeared in 2002, Camino was a Mac application first and foremost. Using the Gecko rendering engine and written (mostly) in Objective-C and (mostly) using the Cocoa API, it included tight system-level integration with OS X and used operating system tools like the OS X Keychain for storing passwords. The dominant OS X browsers in 2002 were Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac and OmniWeb; Camino won mindshare by presenting itself as a Mac-centered open source project driven by passionate developers. The browser was based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, and it quickly grew from a small prerelease project to a functional Mac browser with a devoted user base.

The rise of strong WebKit-based browsers, though, obviated much of Camino's reason for existence. Apple's own Safari matured and quickly displaced Camino as the most Mac-like browser. Over the last several years, Camino has lagged behind Safari, Chrome, and Firefox in both performance and security; the browser's last official release was more than a full year ago. These days, Mac Web browsers that look and act like standard Mac applications are the norm.

Farewell, Camino. You've done your job, and now it's time to rest.

Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Lee_Ars